UNITED NATIONS, April 18. /TASS/. US is destabilizing the situation on the Korean peninsula and a thermonuclear war may break out in the region at any moment, the North Korean ambassador to the UN, Kim In Ryong told reporters on Monday.
He leveled sharp criticism at the US and South Korea for conducting the war games of unprecedented scope and scale and said they could entail dire consequences for peace in the region.
"As everybody knows, nowadays the US without any hesitation perpetrates military attacks and threatens a sovereign state while claiming "peace by strength," Ambassador Kim said. "The recent US massive missile attack on Syria tells you well of it."
"The US is disturbing global peace and stability and insisting on the gangster-like logic that its invasion of a sovereign state is "decisive, just and proportionate" and contributes to "defending" the international order in its bid to apply it to the Korean peninsula as well," the ambassador said.
"The US introduces into the Korean peninsula, the world’s biggest hotspot, huge nuclear strategic assets, seriously threatening peace and security of the peninsula and pushing the situation there to the brink of a war," Kim said.
"This has created a situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment on the peninsula and posed a serious threat to world peace and security, to say nothing of those in Northeast Asia," he said.
The ambassador stressed North Korea’s resolve to stay calm in the face of aggressive policies of the Donald Trump Administration, which keeps deploying armaments in South Korea and trumpeting about its intentions to seek peace through the use of force along the way.
The DPRK has never begged for peace but is prepared to take tough countermeasures in order to defend itself with its military might and to move down the pathway it has chosen for itself, Kim said adding that Pyongyang was going to bring the US to account for aftermaths of the Americans’ actions.
"The DPRK’s measures for bolstering up nuclear force are self-defensive ones to cope with the US vicious nuclear threat and blackmail," he said. "They reflect the determination of the army and people of the DPRK to counter nukes and the ICBM in kind."
Kim also said the North Korean authorities had never recognized "the unreasonable resolutions adopted by the UN Security Council against it with the U.S. double-dealing standard."
"The prevailing grave situation proves once again that the DPRK was entirely just when it increased in every possible way its military capabilities for self-defense and preemptive attack with a nuclear force as a pivot," he said.
"As long as the US and its vassal forces scheme to bring down the socialist system in the DPRK, it will further increase its military muscle, protect peace and security of the country by its own efforts and invariably pursue its line in the future, too," the ambassador said.